How Attivo Partners Shifted from Processing to Advising with Brex and Puzzle
400+
VC-backed startup clients served
90%
of transactions are auto-categorized with Puzzle bots
86.9%
of accuracy reached in recent months
On Saturday, December 20, 2025, parts of San Francisco went dark.
A power outage knocked out electricity across large sections of the city. Some traffic signals went dark too. If you were driving, you felt it immediately. Intersections stopped being predictable and started being negotiated. People adapted. Some cautiously. Some aggressively.
Then the robotaxis hit the same intersections.
Waymo vehicles stalled in the disruption, and Waymo paused service.
John Truong of Attivo Partners likes that story because it's an extreme version of something accounting firms live through constantly: the real world refuses to behave like a clean demo.
Most month-end closes do not come with a headline. They come with smaller failures that pile up. A missing receipt. A vendor that changes names. A policy that reads well in a doc and falls apart the minute spend gets messy. A founder who wants an answer now, not after the close.
"Technology is amazing," John says, "but you still need the human element to design guardrails and controls, and handle the exceptions."
He is describing the mindset that led Attivo Partners, a firm supporting 400+ high-growth, VC-backed startups, to re-engineer its operating model. They didn't chase automation to reduce headcount. They chased leverage. They wanted software to absorb modern finance volume, while accountants stayed responsible for the output and managed the processes.
This is how Attivo rebuilt its workflow with Brex's intelligent finance platform and Puzzle's accounting software, and how that shift moved the firm from transaction processing to strategic advising.
Attivo was scaling fast. The accounting wasn’t getting more complex. The operations were getting heavier. John remembers it clearly.
“It wasn’t complexity. It was volume and friction. It was manually reviewing various things in the month-end close, coding inconsistencies, chasing down receipts.”
Friction has a hidden cost. It steals senior attention.
Before Brex and Puzzle:
“We had highly skilled team members spending most of the time validating repetitive low-risk activity,” he says. “It’s not leverage at all.”
That leads to the question that shows up in every scaling firm, usually right around the moment someone realizes they’re hiring just to keep up with paperwork.
“Why are we scaling linearly? More transactions, more people. Where’s the economies of scale here?”
Before Brex and Puzzle, Attivo relied on a standard but fragmented financial stack. QuickBooks for the ledger. Separate systems for reimbursements, bill pay, and corporate cards. Each tool did its job. None of them spoke fluently to the others.
John pauses when describing it.
“It wasn’t really connected with anything,” he recalls. “A lot of manual import-exports. Waiting for CSVs.”
When systems are fragmented, controls get fragmented with them. A policy that’s easy to enforce in one tool becomes a headache in another. You end up with multiple workflows, multiple approval chains, and multiple places for things to break.
Most firms normalize this. It becomes “how we do month-end.” Then they wonder why the close always feels like a scramble.
Attivo didn’t want self-driving accounting. They wanted governed execution.
They rebuilt around two jobs that must work together:
Brex became the operating system for corporate cards and spend management, and Puzzle became the accounting engine. The effect was immediate.
“It was a breath of fresh air,” John says. “Things that we thought we had to do manually were just automated.”
But the most important part wasn’t “automation.” It was what stayed human.
Responsibility. Judgment. Final sign-off.
This is what changed in practice.
Brex consolidates spend into one system across cards, reimbursements, banking, and bill pay. Context is captured at the point of spend, including receipts, memos, categories, and GL codes.
The quiet win is consistency. Controls become enforceable because the workflow lives in one system, not three tools with three rule sets.
With Brex and Puzzle connected, spend data flows into the ledger in real time, with context intact. Puzzle handles the high-volume preparation work.
For Attivo clients on Puzzle, John estimates:
“Puzzle bots handle 90%+ of our transactions,” John says. “We’re really only doing exception-based reviews.”
Senior accountant capacity has increased without adding headcount. Instead of reviewing nearly every transaction, the team shifted to exception-based oversight. The hours reclaimed went back into higher-value work.
The old model treats close like an event. The month ends, and then the chase begins.
With continuous preparation, close becomes review.
John describes it in a way that sounds almost boring, and that’s the point.
“At the end of the month it’s not chasing people down for things, it’s just reviewing and making sure. Yep, check.”
Boring is what control feels like.
The visible change is time saved. The meaningful change is where that time goes.
Attivo moved away from selling value through transaction categorization and toward being a real thought partner.
“It’s really allowing us to shift from being a transaction processing mentality to being strategic oversight, working more on providing insights,” John says. “It’s allowing us to replace that time we would have spent just dealing with transaction categorization, to actually advising our clients, interpreting the financials.”
That shift changes the client conversation.
Less time spent on missing receipts and coding debates. More time spent on growth, burn, runway, spend decisions, and planning. More confidence in the numbers, and it comes sooner.
For a top accounting firm, the business outcome is straightforward: you cannot scale advisory if senior talent is trapped in low-risk validation.
By removing operational drag, Brex and Puzzle didn’t just make Attivo faster. They made the workflow controllable at scale, and Attivo became smarter.
When the lights go out, speed stops mattering. Control does.
The question isn’t whether your system moves fast in a clean demo.
It’s whether it keeps working when the intersection gets messy.
That’s what Attivo rebuilt.
Not self-driving accounting. Governed automation.
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